The Fluoride Deception

Overview

Veteran investigative journalist Christopher Bryson's new book on the highly controversial subject of fluoride could not come at a more important time.
On March 22, 2006, a prestigious 12-member panel of the National Research Council completed a three year review of the appropriateness of the Environmental Protection Ageny's (EPA) safe drinking water standard for fluoride (the Maximum Contaminant Level Goal, or MCLG). After one of the most thorough and objective reviews of the literature in 60 years, the NRC panel unanimously found that the MCLG is too high and has asked EPA to lower the standard in order to protect children against severe dental fluorosis and to protect all groups from bone fracture. They have asked the EPA to perform a risk assessment to determine what the standard should be.
In a society where asbestos, lead, silica, beryllium and many other carcinogens have found their way into the marketplace and then been recalled, one has to wonder why fluoride, so toxic it is used as a rat poison and pesticide, is embraced so thoroughly and so blindly.
With the narrative punch of Jonathan Harr's A Civil Action and the commitment to environmental truth-telling of Erin Brockovich, The Fluoride Deception documents a powerful connection between big corporations, the U.S. military, and the historic reassurances of fluoride safety provided by the nation's public health establishment.
The Fluoride Deception shows that fluoride pollution was one of the biggest legal worries facing additional key U.S. industrial sectors during the Cold War. And the book documents how a hitherto-secret group of corporate attorneys, known as the Fluorine Lawyers Committee, whose members included U.S. Steel, Alcoa, Kaiser Aluminum, and Reynolds Metals, commissioned research at the Kettering Laboratory at the University of Cincinnati to "provide ammunition" to those corporations who were then fighting a tidal wave of citizen claims for fluoride injury. The research was directed by Dr. Robert A. Kehoe, more famous for his lifetime defense of the safety of leaded gasoline. When the half million dollar medical study showed that fluoride poisoned lungs and lymph nodes in laboratory animals, the research was buried, until Bryson dug up a copy during research for his book. One leading scientist who reviewed the 40-year-old Kettering study suggested that its non-publication might have been responsible for an epidemic of emphysema among key sector of the industrial workforce.
Christopher Bryson has reported science news stories for media outlets such as the BBC and the Christian Science Monitor, and for the Discovery Channel through NBC and ABC News Productions. He was part of an investigative team at Public Television that won a George Polk Award for "The Kwitny Report." The book has an introduction by Theo Colborn, co-author of Our Stolen Future (1996), which was the subject of a PBS Frontline documentary, and a postscript by the 2000 Nobel Prize winner for Medicine, Dr. Arvid Carlsson.
The Fluoride Deception reads like a thriller, but one supported by 200 pages of source notes, years of investigative reporting, scores of scientist interviews, and archival research in places such as the newly opened files of the Manhattan Project and the Atomic Energy Commission. The book is nothing less than an exhumation of one of the great secret narratives of the industrial era; how a grim workplace poison and the most damaging environmental pollutant of the cold war was added to our drinking water and toothpaste.

Editorial Reviews

Concerns over fluoridated drinking water have long been derided as the obsession of McCarthyite cranks. But this muckraking j'accuse asserts that fluoride is indeed a dire threat to public health, one foisted upon the nation by a vast conspiracy--not of Communist agents, but of our very own military-industrial complex. Investigative reporter Bryson revisits the decades-long controversy, drawing on mountains of scientific studies, some unearthed from secret archives of government and corporate laboratories, to question the effects of fluoride and the motives of its leading advocates. The efficacy of fluoridated drinking water in preventing tooth decay, he contends, is dubious. Fluoride in its many forms may be one of the most toxic of industrial pollutants, and Bryson cites scientific analyses linking fluoridated drinking water to bone deformities, hyperactivity and a host of other complaints. The post-war campaign to fluoridate drinking water, he claims, was less a public health innovation than a public relations ploy sponsored by industrial users of fluoride--including the government's nuclear weapons program. Legendary spin doctors like Edward Bernays exploited the tenuous link between dental hygiene and fluoridation to create markets to stimulate fluoride production and to prove the innocuousness of fluoride compounds, thereby heading off lawsuits by factory workers and others poisoned by industrial fluoride pollution. Bryson marshals an impressive amount of research to demonstrate fluoride's harmfulness, the ties between leading fluoride researchers and the corporations who funded and benefited from their research, and what he says is the duplicity with which fluoridation was sold to the people. The result is a compelling challenge to the reigning dental orthodoxy, which should provoke renewed scientific scrutiny and public debate.
Copyright (c) Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Author Information

Bio of Christopher Bryson

Christopher Bryson is an award-winning investigative reporter and a television producer. He covered Guatemalan Army human rights abuses from Central America in the late 1980's for the BBC World Service, National Public Radio and The Atlanta Constitution. He was part of an investigative team which won a George Polk Award and Sidney Hillman Prize with Jonathan Kwitny at Public Television's The Kwitny Report. Bryson's reporting for The Manchester Guardian, The Christian Science Monitor, Lingua Franca and the BBC has included investigations of David Duke's Nazi past, NASA's nuclear payloads, the Rev. Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church, and CIA links to Radio Free Europe. In 1998 he was part of a team that won a National Headliner award for a History Channel documentary on the bombing of Pan Am flight 103. He lives in New York City with his wife Molly and son Owen.

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Additional Info

Imprint

Seven Stories Press

Filesize

5.95 MB

Number of Pages

400

eBook ISBN

9781583227008